Author Archives: Sandy Stott

The north-country is full of sweet rumor. Driving the backroads at this time of year, you look up from the challenge of deep mud and see occasional shacks or smallish barns billowing steam. Then, you roll down the window and breathe in the sweetened air. It’s sugar time in the woods.

Or, more accurately, sap time, and this year’s run of cold nights and sunny days, salted by occasional snows, has set up a classic season for maple sap and syrup. To be sure, most sugar-bushes look markedly different from their ancestors, whose trees featured gray metal buckets, slung from hooks beneath taps inserted into drill holes in those trees, the whole bush also laced with the tracks of trudgers (sometimes horses) dragging a collecting vat from tree to tree, gathering the sap. Today’s sugar bush is webbed with plastic tubing, often in bright colors, and these veins shunt the sap from tree to tree, ever-down toward a collecting point, often the sugar house itself, where they drip into containers prior to the boiling.

Still, the old buckets with their shallow triangular hats persist in places, often as small family operations that make syrup and sugar for personal use and gifts. These little sugarers, with steam rising from a shed out back or from a vent over the kitchen stove, are my favorites. They cast me back to when I was a little sugarer too.

In my early 20s, I spent a winter in a wood-heated, old farmhouse near the end of a dirt road in west-central New Hampshire. Uncertain about my future, I’d decided on a writing-winter, but really it had turned into a wandering winter, where my scripts were snowshoe tracks into the various corners of the valley and ridges above. I learned a lot and wrote little.

As spring neared, pails appeared on the row of maples that lined the dirt road. A farm family in town had asked for and received permission to tap these roadside trees, and, every so often, I began to lift the bucket’s lids and check on the sap levels. After a few days, I noticed that many of the buckets were full, and I figured the collecting truck, a sort of small tanker, would be there to gather the bounty soon. A day passed. No tanker. The buckets dripped steadily with overflow now eroding the collars of snow below.

Living at road’s end had made me a bit of a scrounge, and now I did what any good scrounge would do: I got a big bucket, took my ladle from beside the water-pump and began to skim ladlefuls from the overflowing buckets. This went on for some days, and by then, I had gallons of sap.

What to do? Time, surely, to fire up the cookstove and break out the broad turkey pan and do some boiling. I had a lot of wood, a lot of time, and, even when the tree-tapper emptied his pails, I soon had a lot of overflow.

For the next two weeks, I made syrup of varying intensities. Those who know anything about making maple syrup will recognize the oft-cited 40 to 1 ratio of sap to syrup. In short, it takes a lot of sap and boiling to make sweet immersion for your pancakes. What may be less known is the sweet world a room or house becomes if you do your boiling indoors. Saphouses are well-vented, outdoor enterprises for a reason.

Still, I got used to the always-sweet, humid air, and, aside from a little crystallized sugar on the beam above the stove, the old farmhouse seemed to adapt too. Entering the house from a day of woods wandering, or from some bucket-skimming was like coming into a large maple confection. And as the sap boiled down from water-clarity to various shades of amber, I began to eat only foods that called for syrup. I became, in short, a sort of sugar bear.

By March’s end, I had a couple of gallons of dense amber syrup. A few, hand-labeled quarts went for gifts. And, when I left the valley as spring came on, I carried the rest with me as the sweet writing of maples.

Today, a week into the changed sky of daylight savings, broke clear and cold. After days of melt, yesterday’s front had scattered a scrim of snow that purified the old drifts, and the returned cold had tightened them. Another day of winter, though one so fully lit as to deceive through the windows. But once I stepped outside and felt the air’s tensile strength, I knew winter was back, if only for a short stay.

“Before I go,” this day seemed to say, “think about the gifts a winter day brings. Instead of pining for spring, breathe in the immediate; consider the cold day.”

A while ago, during my winter reading of Thoreau’s 1854 journal, I’d come across paean to such a day:

To make a perfect winter day like this, you must have clear, sparkling air, with a sheen from the snow, sufficient cold, little or no wind; and the warmth must come directly from the sun. It must not be a thawing warmth. The tension of nature must not be relaxed. The earth must be resonant if bare, and you hear the lisping tinkle of chickadees from time to time and the unrelenting steel-cold scream of the jay, unmelted, that never flows into song, a sort of wintry trumpet, screaming cold; hard, tense, frozen music, like the winter sky itself; in the blue livery of winter’s band. It is like a flourish of trumpets to the winter sky. There is no hint of incubation in the jay’s scream. Like the creak of a cart-wheel. There is no cushion for sounds now. They tear our ears. –  Journal, 2/12/54

Sure enough, the jay screamed; and the chickadees gathered in tiny riot around the birdfeeder; even in stripes where the sun had uncovered the grass, the ground was hard.

On my way to the woods, I stopped a number of times and listened. Thoreau was right – the was no “cushion for sounds now.” Each bird had immediate voice. A distant motor thrummed as if nearby. Somehow, as I walked on, I was nearer to the crunch of my steps. “The tension of nature” was surely not “relaxed.”

But the day changed, as the late season will, and during an afternoon walk, this little song of shift blew in. We were walking through an expanse of fields not far from the sea, and I was watching the clouds in the northeast. They boiled up dark, and the wind seemed to draw them on; from their bellies indistinct vapor seemed to trail. In summer that mist would be veils of rain. “That could be snow,” I said. And, some minutes later, it was – at first, one flake and another; then, a thickened froth. I could hear the little slaps on the left side of my face as the water-heavy flakes hit.

In two minutes, the upwind, left sides of our bodies were white like tree trunks facing a storm. We reached the car, shook off the snow and climbed in to watch the tantrum pass. The wind rocked the car, and from our inside eddy we watched the fields whiten like a time-lapsed photo.

Then it was done. Five minutes later the snow had melted; winter was whistling away, a whole season in a day. Oddly, there had been “incubation” in this flurried snow. The light in the sky was growing again; in a few days the vernal equinox would balance us before spring.

By Corinne H. Smith

Tradition holds that robins mark the return of Spring. When the month of March comes around, people begin to report with some glee of the robins they’ve spotted. The sight of these colorful birds yard-bobbing for worms assures us that winter is finally over. (Never mind that some robins now seem to stay with us year-round.) I used to believe in this myth myself.

But when I lived in Illinois, I noticed another, truer feathered symbol of Spring: the red-winged blackbird. Or more specifically, the males of this species. In late February or early March, these guys came north to stake out their territories. I would drive around the open prairie or through partial wetlands, and I would marvel at the sight. It was as if a delivery van had passed by, and someone had tossed out a bird every twenty yards. Individual male red-wings were perched in small trees, on fence posts, or hanging onto last year’s cat-tails. They distributed themselves evenly. Each one left just enough footage on either side so that he wouldn’t encroach on the neighboring birds’ spaces. When there were disputes, two blackbirds would be seen swooping at one another. By a certain time, however, all the land lining the Midwestern highways was claimed.

Henry Thoreau thought red-wings won the springtime coin toss, too. “No two have epaulets equally brilliant,” he noted on May 14, 1853. “Some are small and almost white, and others a brilliant vermilion. They are handsomer than the golden robin, methinks.”

When Thoreau embarked on his Journey West in 1861, he reached the Mississippi River in late May. There, he wrote in his notebook, “Red wing b. bird the prevailing to Mississippi R.” The birds would have been busy with their young by then. He still could have picked out their voices coming from the marshy edges of the riverbanks.

I wish I could mimic them. I can whistle like cardinals and chickadees, but I cannot recreate the call or song of the red-winged blackbird. There’s a buzzing in it that appears to be beyond human duplication. Thoreau was similarly intrigued. He defined the sound in his journal on April 22, 1852:

The strain of the red-wing on the willow spray over the water to-night
is liquid, bubbling, watery, almost like a tinkling fountain, in perfect
harmony with the meadow. It oozes, trickles, tinkles, bubbles from his
throat, — bob-y-lee-e-e, and then its shrill, fine whistle.

Twenty-first-century birders hear “conk-kar-ree,” “konk-la-ree,” or “o-ka-lay.” But to Mr. Thoreau’s ears, the red wing said “bob-y-lee-e-e.” Nevertheless: once you hear the sound and can link it to the bird, you’ll never forget it.

I recall clearly the March day when I was traveling through western New York. I decided to stop at Niagara Falls, just to watch the water. The main portion of the park was still closed for the season because of the thick ice and snow on the trails. Chunks of ice roared past us and quickly disappeared over the rim. It was mesmerizing to watch and try to follow one ice floe until it was lost from sight. As always, the waterfall was incredibly loud.

Suddenly I heard another sound, a more delicate sound, a sound I was familiar with. Yes, it was March, but was I merely imagining my bird of Spring? I looked around, wondering where a red-winged blackbird could be hiding. He turned out to be in plain sight, sitting at the top of one of the lone bare trees growing out from the rocks. And he was singing at the top of his lungs, competing with one of Nature’s largest sound-makers, streaming right behind him. I couldn’t help but smile and wish him a successful year. He sure chose a great place to raise a family.